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BRITA BERGMAN n Sweden, linguistic research on sign language has contributed to improving the status of Swedish Sign Language, and thereby the situation of deaf people. To our knowledge, Sweden leads the world in official recognition of the sign language used by the deaf community. We are proud to have been invited to The Deaf Way Conference and to have the opportunity to inform you about recent developments in Sweden. The paper that follows this one, written by Mr. Lars Wallin, will present a description of the successful fight for full recognition of Swedish Sign Language led by the Swedish National Organization of the Deaf and the changes that victory has brought to both the Deaf community and to hearing Swedish society. In my paper, I will give some background information to explain this development. Then I will introduce you to the concept of language in general, after which I will focus on sign language. In so doing, I will deal with some of the misconceptions about sign language that I encountered in the early 1970s, when the study of sign language in our country began, and I will give examples of what is now known about sign language. Sweden, one of the Scandinavian countries, is about the size of California. The population is approximately 8 million, with about 8,000 deaf people (one per thousand). There are five schools for deaf students. We can still see an increasing interest in sign language in Sweden, both from hearing people in general and from deaf and hearing signers in particular. I do not think that users of other languages are as eager to learn about their respective languages as signers are. After all, it could be argued that there is nothing very special about sign language. Swedish Sign Language is a language like any other-one that has evolved naturally through the need of human beings to communicate with each other. It is linked to the lives of its users, and it is a reflection of the culture in which it is used. It has a vocabulary and grammar of its own. It is as complicated and richly structured as any other human language. It is true that sign language lacks a written form, but so do many spoken languages in the world. It is also true that sign language is not an official language of any nation, but there are many languages that are not. And yet, there is one aspect of sign language A revised version of this paper, which was originally presented at The Deaf Way, was later presented at the International Congress on Sign Language Research and Application, March 23-25, 1990 in Hamburg. That version has been printed in Sign Language Research and Application, edited by Siegmund Prillwitz and Tomas Vollhaber, 1990, Hamburg, Germany: SIGNUM-Press. The signs shown in this article are demonstrated by Inga-Lena Adolfsson, the photographs are by Yngre Fransson. 310 THE DEAF WAY ~ The Study of Sign Language in Society that is special: It is a signed language, not spoken. So there are two types of human natural languages that differ with respect to how they are produced and perceived: Sign language can be characterized as a gestural-visual type of language, and spoken language as a vocal-auditory type. Because hearing people are in the majority and in power, spoken language has been regarded as the only true form of language. The language of the deaf minority has been thought of as an insufficient system of communication, not a real, full-fledged language, and this is still the case in many countries. Ignorance and prejudice have led to oppression of signed languages by those in power. You all know that the oppression has gone so far that sign language has been excluded from the schools of deaf students, not only as a subject in its own right, but also as a means of communication. The exclusion of sign language from education also has made deaf people themselves think that signed language is inferior to spoken language. Nothing could be more wrong. Languages may be different, but they have the same value and fulfill the same communicative tasks. It is generally agreed that it is necessary to study officially accepted languages, both to learn more about a specific language and to gain more knowledge about human language in general. As for oppressed languages, I can also see another impetus to study them: Knowledge about languages is a powerful weapon in the...

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